Last year, the Fawcett Society launched its Seeing Double campaign by celebrating the 20th anniversary of Diane Abbott's election as the first ethnic minority woman MP. The reception, on the terrace of the House of Commons, was packed: it was a rare occasion for most of the parliamentary staff to see that many black woman milling in this most exclusive of spaces.

Fawcett used the occasion to highlight ethnic minority women's severe under-representation in politics. After two decades, the Commons can now boast a tidy sum of - wait for it - two black women MPs. There have only ever been three ethnic minority women MPs elected and there has never been an Asian woman MP. There are currently no ethnic minority women in the Cabinet as Baroness Amos is no longer Leader of the House of Lords and Baroness Scotland's role as attorney general is not strictly a Cabinet position. And there are no ethnic minority women in either the Scottish parliament or the Welsh assembly.

Recently, Fawcett launched the final report of its Routes to Power study on ethnic minority women leaders that explored the reasons for this under-representation. As the interim report on local councillors also highlighted, it is organisational cultures that stop women reaching senior decision-making positions. The interim report, in fact, showed that the reason why less than one percent of councillors are ethnic minority women is that councils and political parties are exclusive. Political parties were specifically named as problematic for their lack of leadership in recruiting ethnic minority women to their parties and then acting as gatekeepers to potential candidates.

Just last month, Dawn Butler spoke out about the racism and sexism she's experienced in parliament in an exclusive interview in Fawcett's newly published collection (pdf) of essays on race and gender in ethnic minority women's lives. Citing some truly appalling behaviour, Dawn candidly admits, "People generally don't believe I'm an MP. Because I'm black. Because I'm a woman. Because I'm quite young." Even though there are only two black women MPs out of 646, visible minorities if ever there were any, Dawn still gets mistaken for the secretary at events.

Evidently, politics has some ways to go before it can be said to be either representative or fair for ethnic minority women in the UK.

It is for this reason that Fawcett has long supported the use of all-women shortlists to increase women's representation in parliament. All women shortlists are the only practical way to redress the imbalance in women's representation in parliament.

Operation Black Vote (OBV) has also published its evidence on why the use of all-black shortlists is a similarly useful mechanism for addressing the under-representation of ethnic minority people in parliament. Aside from the distracting non-questions around logistics (for example, how does someone prove they are from an ethnic minority background? Answer: same way we prove it now - we say so), one of the most likely challenges to any proposal for their use will be: why should we assume that a white MP is less likely to be able to represent their black constituents than a black MP?

To ask this question, however, is to profoundly misunderstand the point of shortlists. Shortlists are designed to address discrimination: the very real barriers to candidate selection that exist at party level. If parties were currently selecting on the basis of merit, instead of prejudice, we wouldn't need shortlists. Shortlists eliminate racial and gender bias by, literally, eliminating the option to employ either bias in making a selection decision.

Shortlists also defend the idea that a more representative parliament leads to better democracy. Fawcett's long-standing campaign to increase the numbers of women MPs is based on the fact that as the numbers of women in politics increases, matters of importance to women move further up the political agenda. Our new national campaign, femocracy, works directly with ethnic minority women for exactly this reason. Indeed a new study called Women and British Party Politics confirms that as the number of women in politics has increased in the last 10 years, issues of particular concern to women have been increasingly mainstreamed into policy and political debate.

As the struggle to increase political accountability to women and ethnic minority women in the UK continues, it becomes ever more obvious that there are two key challenges at play: the need to change who participates in the system and the need to change the nature of the system itself. But the trick is in recognising the link between the two - there is no excuse for an unrepresentative democracy in this day and age but, until we change the way our political parties work, we will never have the politicians we need.